I don't know if anybody owns a Sat Nav. I know they aren't really needed on Crete but they can be useful when travelling outside of Crete. I own a TomTom Via 135 that was bought including free full Europe map updates "for life". Please be aware when considering such products that the time constraint does not mean "your life". It means "the useful life of the product" which, in turn, means for as long as TomTom decide to support that product. Perhaps the advert should read: "Free full Europe map updates for as long as we decide to give them to you". I discovered today that in the case of my Sat Nav it actually means 10 years.

Somewhat misleading advertising seems to be getting more common. A couple of years ago I bought a Samsung flat screen smart TV. It came with a lot of smart features built in. After about 1 year, from time to time it displays a notice at the top of the screen, when you first turn on, that one or other of these services is being discontinued after a specified date. By now virtually all the smart services it was sold with have gone. Personally I don't care because I never use any of the smart functions but if I did I think I would be a little vexed. I bought the set for its picture quality and the better quality screens tend to be on the more upmarket models. I wonder what the public reaction would be if they bought a new car and after one year the manufacturer started coming to their houses periodically and taking things off the vehicle? Perhaps starting with non essential items like the radio and working up to things like the wheels or the doors.

Am usually asked at LGW if I want a satnav in my hire car. Answer along the lines of 'wouldn't know what to do with it - but I do have a map and a good navigator alongside'. Kilikis says not much use in Crete. Echo that. Friends staying in Kalyves wanted our postode to get from there to Kokkino Horio using sat nav. Putting in 73008 wasn't a great help! Bob.

bobscott wrote:Am usually asked at LGW if I want a satnav in my hire car. Answer along the lines of 'wouldn't know what to do with it - but I do have a map and a good navigator alongside'. Kilikis says not much use in Crete. Echo that. Friends staying in Kalyves wanted our postode to get from there to Kokkino Horio using sat nav. Putting in 73008 wasn't a great help! Bob.

Never pay extra to add one to a hire car. I bought one for not much more than it would have cost for two weeks hire. I've used it for about 10 trips to the UK and France and I think Scooby has also used it about five times so it was good value for money. In the UK they couldn't be easier to use. Put in the post code and the house number, press "navigate" and it will take you to the door. Presumably your friends thought it would work the same here. You can also store what you put in as a favourite and then just call that up when you go again. Quite useful for finding your way back to the hire car depot if it is off airport and you haven't used it before. Simply store the current location as a favourite before you set off.

Your friends could have changed the input method from post code to latitude and longitude then you could have looked those up for your house on Google Earth and sent them to them in an email. That is how I use it in France, since Cedex seems to work more like Greece and you have to also put a street name and number. Like here, not much good in rural areas where the property is outside the town.

They can be very useful, especially when you don't have a navigator, and I think the horror stories are pretty rare but not very nice if you suffer one. I've no complaints about the Tom Tom device itself. Apart from a minor problem when it screwed up a map update, which took a bit of effort to solve, it works pretty well. If you deviate from a route it tries to get you to go back but not for very long and after a short distance it recalculates the route. One that was built into a car I hired kept trying to get me to go back for miles before it finally recalculated. Also the updates can be phenomenally expensive for built in ones since they often have to be done by the dealer. I wouldn't rely on the speed camera warnings. I find they tend to give a lot of false positives and also fail to spot many actual cameras.

Having worked in breakdown and recovery for about 14 years I bought one as I thought it would be constantly used, but found I only ever used it if I was going somewhere I'd never been or heard of. Maybe it's an age thing but a good map and a bit of common sense works every time. Naturally I exclude my wife's navigational skills from this statement.

George wrote:... but found I only ever used it if I was going somewhere I'd never been or heard of...

Obviously it isn't needed on a route you travel regularly. I often find it's most useful for the last bit of the journey. Because I only travel back to the UK twice per year and tend to visit different friends each time I visit, I sometimes find that they have moved since the last time I visited them. I can find my way to virtually any town in the UK without the sat nav but getting to the right street and house can be a problem. I visited one friend in Stratford upon Avon whose new house was in a "street" that was really about a dozen interlinked cul-de-sacs all with the same name and with what appeared to be random house numbering. The sat nav took me straight to the door.

It can also be useful on unfamiliar, busy motorways. It will usually give you lots of warning when you are approaching the junction you want. Finding yourself in the outside lane of six on a packed motorway with only a couple of hundred yards to the junction, because your view of the first sign was blocked by a high-sided vehicle, can be a bit of a nightmare.

Like many technology products, everybody can live without one but they do have their uses.

I used my TomTom last week in Cyprus. I located the destination in Google Earth Pro, punched the lat/long into the satnav and it worked reasonably OK. The only hiccup was that my destination was on the RAF Akrotiri base! Something (National Security?) added about an hour to the actual journey time and also directed me by a very roundabout route (which I ignored). I guess that's so it can't be used for missile targeting. Apart from that, it got us in and out of Lefkosia without incident.

I also use it on Crete in the same way by looking up the coordinates in Google Earth Pro. Of course there are times when I can't do that so I scroll through the satnav map screen, locate the destination and then select it - storing it as a "favourite" if I'm likely to use it again. Also, having reached a difficult-to-find location, I often store it "save current location" for future use by me or by visitors.

I find it especially useful in hire cars. I set the "current location" as soon as I get the car. That saves time and hassle when I have to return the car.